The federal Environmental Protection Agency has said it may take over cleanup of the former Goodrich Corp. toxic waste site in San Bernardino County, adding it to the national priorities or Superfund list.
Contamination from perchlorate led the Rialto City Council to declare a water emergency last year. From the EPA's announcement:
A federal judge signed an order dismissing legal actions pertaining to water contamination in the Rialto-Colton Groundwater Basin while local governments continue their efforts to broker a settlement with the alleged polluters.
Officials at a Rialto-based public water purveyor are accusing San Bernardino County of illegally demolishing and burying a hazardous waste-disposal facility and likely contributing to water contamination flowing through Rialto.
Lawyers for the West Valley Water District say state and federal laws were violated when the facility was demolished, and they say the debris spread across a wide area and was buried.
The California Department of Toxic Substances Control, or DTSC, is investigating what happened at the Broco Inc. site, named for the hazardous-waste disposal operation located there from the 1960s to the 1980s. The county purchased the property in 1994 to expand the Mid-Valley Sanitary Landfill.
Before they learned words like dioxin and perchlorate, mothers let sons and daughters play near streams that trickled down from hills that hid some of the government's biggest secrets.
Families who settled in neighborhoods blooming in Chatsworth, West Hills and Simi Valley led idyllic lives, even when their bedroom and kitchen windows rattled from the roar of rocket engines being tested at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in the Simi Hills.
But in May 1989, surveys from the Department of Energy - reported exclusively in the Daily News - revealed that radioactive and toxic contamination from decades of nuclear experiments and rocket tests had leaked into soil, groundwater and bedrock at the hilltop site.
Care for a glass of rocket fuel?: EPA ignores a toxic threat
Melamine contamination of Chinese milk products has sickened more than 50,000 infants. Tens of thousands have been hospitalized, including a few who have died. Now all of Asia is in a panic.
The nation's biggest polluter isn't a corporation. It's the Pentagon. Every year the Department of Defense churns out more than 750,000 tons of hazardous waste -- more than the top three chemical companies combined.
Yet the military remains largely exempt from compliance with most federal and state environmental laws, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Pentagon's partner in crime, is working hard to keep it that way.
